Imagine being a slave during the 1800s, separated from your family and having to walk 12 miles, each way, to visit at night. That was not an unusual endeavor during that period.

According to Dianne Swann-Wright, museum curator at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park, many slave narratives referred to their use of canoes as transportation, especially that of Douglass, who was born in Talbot County.